Something Has Shifted.

I hesitate to say this too loudly, having learned during the past fifty-some days how unpredictable healing can be. But the incision below my navel is hurting less. The strange “wound weeping” that has required me to change the bandage three times a day seems finally to be diminishing. I am not healed. But I think I have turned a corner.

At almost the same moment, another long travail came to its end. I wrote the final lines of the epic life-poem that has occupied me for almost a year. It comes after the completion of my travel memoir, The Weight of Air.

Needless to say, painting, which has been my passion and given meaning to my life for many decades, bowed for a time to another creative pursuit—the making of words. I could not have planned it, but the current was so strong. And here we are.

Perhaps I have reached toward a wholeness I have yearned for deep down, a culmination of myriad forces. And being broken contributes to the deeper narrative. It is humbling. I look at the world around me in all its magnificence and see that the realm of man is broken too. The news is almost insufferable. The earth itself is warming before our eyes.

The poem began as an idea to write with a biblical voice: a third-person chronicle beginning before my birth, written in canticles, looking back across the whole territory of my life. The narrator who had been following the Wanderer through the decades, writing this blog, arrives at the man sitting at his desk in Oaxaca.

He had set out to render his life in third person, as the chroniclers of old;
Standing apart from the days to see them whole, offering them as witness.
Now he turned to face the work itself—the canticle beneath his hand;
Understanding writing was no mere record, but the journey’s final country.

—From The Canticle of the Open Horizon, last canto of Under the Brilliant Star

Yet the poem cannot end as life ends, for the hand that wrote it lives still.

My body, meanwhile, has literally been weeping through the incision meant to heal me. Three layers of dissolvable stitches have been rejected. For fifty days I have wanted my body simply to close itself and become whole again. Meanwhile spending almost a year writing a life in which the wounds, ruptures, deaths, departures, and failures cannot be removed without destroying the meaning of the whole story.

The manuscript is not finished. There are words to reconsider, proofs to read, illustrations to make, pages to design. And my body is not finished with its own work either. This morning there is still a bandage below my navel. But I have not needed pain relief as before, and there is less weeping from the wound.

Something has shifted.

The poem has reached its horizon. The body seems to be finding its way toward healing. And I am still here, curious about what waits beyond the next rise.

After The Drought

Each year, when May approaches the land is parched from seven months of drought. It is astonishing that despite this, bougainvillea bloom, and an assortment of other plants manage to flower and leaf. Yesterday we had a hard rain, and it was blissful. Also unusual. It is the earliest downpour of this sort we have seen at our pueblo outside Oaxaca since we moved here five and a half years ago.

To our delight, we have recently met several Americans, only to discover they live right here in our village. And they are artists! Both about our age. A poet who is also a translator and is dual citizen, and an accomplished musician who has travelled the world, composing and performing. This feels like a small miracle. We recently celebrated with a party at our home. The two had never met, and we had never met the poet. Now, suddenly, our little circle is widening — an artist colony of sorts. Who would have imagined?

Writing is taking almost all my time these days. I am obsessed. After completing my travel memoir, The Weight of Air, (available by donation for download,) I have begun an epic prose poem of my entire life. The first forty-eight years must be drawn from memory, but fortunately, since 2006 I have written weekly posts here on My Fairy-Tale Life. They have become a kind of archive — a well I can return to — where moments already captured can now be distilled into poetry.

I have also chosen to write in two distinct voices: one modern, spare, and direct; the other more biblical in tone, expansive and lyrical. My method has become this: I write first in the modern cadence, then work with Google Gemini to help render it into the more biblical voice. What comes back is often surprisingly beautiful — a kind of echo, but different orchestration— which I then shape further. And it happens almost instantaneously. A remarkable tool.

Here is a sample of the work flow. A section inspired by the time after Naomi died when my youngest daughter Sarah had begun studies at Columbia College in Chicago, majoring in dance:

In Chicago
the younger daughter flourished.
The city of broad shoulders
received her dancing steps.

Her life opened
with courage and joy.
And the father
felt gratitude rise
like music.

For the child who
had endured sorrow
now walked
with lightness
and hope.

Here is the biblical styled verse:

In Chicago, the younger daughter flourished, and her dancing steps were sure;

The city of broad shoulders received her, and her life opened with the courage of the morning.

The father felt gratitude rise as a song, for the child who had endured the valley of shadow

Now walked in the joy of her own soul, a testament to the resilience of the living.

They both work in there own way. 

At this point, over 24,000 words have been set down. And about 11,000 more to come.
An average poem is 300 words.

While the writing continues, my old muse, painting, stands to the side, asking "Please don't forget me!"

Steven Boone Artwork